Pilots and other aircraft crew members rely on many sources of information to accurately and safely plan and prepare for flights. A significant quantity of this information is relatively unchanging with respect to a particular route and/or aircraft, such as distances between fixed points, aircraft capabilities, and airport/runway configurations. However, one ever-changing factor that is significant to both flight planning and flight operations is the weather. There are numerous sources for weather information, including but not limited to, a meteorological terminal area forecast (METAR), a terminal area forecasts (TAF), an automatic terminal information service (ATIS), significant meteorological information (SIGMET), airman meteorological information (AIRMET), general aviation meteorological information (GAMET), and a pilot report (PIREP).
Weather information from all of these sources and others, including on-board weather radar, is regularly updating and becoming available to pilots. While weather information is very important to the pilots, a large volume of the information is not applicable to the current phase of flight of the aircraft or will likely change before it becomes applicable. The pilot or crew must parse through all of the weather information to manually determine the information that is applicable, and to ascertain the importance of the applicable information. This process is cumbersome and inefficient, which increases the pilot's workload and creates an opportunity for errors to be made as important information may be missed.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.